The sorry state of VR development...

Yakk

Yakk

Supreme [H]ardness
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I've been hearing here and there about the challenges of developing for VR and was looking up some information; some of which I though could be of some interest here. It's sad, but interesting in that it's a free-for-all and a huge mess, so far.

Extremetech had a pretty good article about it "Oculus founder confirms VR is shaping up into an unavoidably fragmented mess".

Looks like the race is on to see who can gain the most support the quickest. Oculus vs. Vavle & HTC vs. Sony vs. Samsung vs. Razer (sortof since they are taking the open-source approach with pushing OpenVR) vs. a bunch of others.

And then there is AMD and nvidia.

AMD has been busy working on forming a VR Council for all companies involved to open communication, while nvidia has been hiding all their VR efforts behind Gameworks. Which is sad as they are applying the same fragmentation strategy as they do in the general PC gaming market, but no surprise I guess.

So in the short term it's looking like depending on who develops an application or game will dictate which hardware will get supported. Hopefully in a couple years some kind of understanding will help defragment this mess, otherwise it's going to be gamers who will pay, or be denied, some games and/or features.
 
Looks like I will be sticking with my monitors for a few more years then if that is the case. I would really love to see a game like the Witcher 3 in VR. I'm sure it would be simply stunning in the open world environment.
 
Clearly you weren't around for the begining of Hardware 3D Accelerators.

DirectX, OpenGL, 3DFx Glide, RRedline,S3 MeTal, and more that I'm forgetting.

When technology is new everyone wants in. This is nothing new it's happened before, it'll happen again.

In fact it shows that VR is a healthy technology.
 
hehehe... guess I can remember a bit further back... beta vs. vhs, u.s. robotics x2 56k battle..etc... Lots of money at stake, yes it's always a mess at first, not a time to buy in as consumers though.
 
Yakk said:
hehehe... guess I can remember a bit further back... beta vs. vhs, u.s. robotics x2 56k battle..etc... Lots of money at stake, yes it's always a mess at first, not a time to buy in as consumers though.
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I dunno if you wanna play hardware accelerated quake buy a 3Dfx card.

If you wanna play EVE Valkyrie, buy an Oculus.

3Dfx disappeared (bought by nvidia), maybe Oculus will too, doesn't mean jumping in at the beginning is a bad idea, or even one you'll regret.
 
obiwansotti said:
I dunno if you wanna play hardware accelerated quake buy a 3Dfx card.

If you wanna play EVE Valkyrie, buy an Oculus.

3Dfx disappeared (bought by nvidia), maybe Oculus will too, doesn't mean jumping in at the beginning is a bad idea, or even one you'll regret.
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Facebook's purchase of Oculus have given them access to plenty of cash and influence to support them. They're a big player.

Playing Eve on Oculus or Morpheus, but not Vive, unless it comes to Steam, maybe. Looks like wait, or buy a bunch of different incompatible headgear which need to run on select GPUs. Doesn't seem like progress so far.
 
Yes it might be a fragmented mess, but honestly whocares. Standards take a long time to work themselves out because approval by committee is a long process. If you internalize the api/working model it's much quicker turn around. We would be waiting another year or 2 if everybody was waiting for a standard.

Regardless of standardized or proprietary, first gen is going to have a lifespan of ~2years I suspect. By then they'll have higher resolution displays. Possibly better controls. So then you'll need to upgrade anyhow. Not to mention you might have to throw another $500-1000 for an upgraded gpu to drive that higher res version.

So really why complain about proprietary implementations? It's that way in every industry across the board until the tech matures enough where things stabilize enough to benefit from a standard.
 
Yup HDR in TVs is about to come out and it's going to be the same mess.

Revolutionary technology begets formats wars. It's the sign of a healthy industry.
 
AMD fans say we can't let AMD die because we need competition.

However when it's competition that does not benefit them, they call it "fragmenting". :rolleyes:

It's a good thing that we have multiple companies developing competing options for the market.
 
PRIME1 said:
AMD fans say we can't let AMD die because we need competition.

However when it's competition that does not benefit them, they call it "fragmenting". :rolleyes:

It's a good thing that we have multiple companies developing competing options for the market.
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Did you post in the wrong thread?
 
My money's on Oculus. They've got Facebook cash which is a huge advantage. They've also got the most namebrand recognition by far, to the point that already "Oculus" is synonymous with VR. Finally, they're not against working with other companies, and as a result Samsung's GearVR is basically another Oculus product, to the extent that it's even listed on Oculus's site.
 
I like the way Valve is developing VR. When they discover something interesting and beneficial, they share it like AMD does. No idea what Nvidia is doing and that may be a good thing in the long run.
 
Yakk said:
I've been hearing here and there about the challenges of developing for VR and was looking up some information; some of which I though could be of some interest here. It's sad, but interesting in that it's a free-for-all and a huge mess, so far.
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It really isn't "a huge mess", though I can see how a casual observer might see it that way. There are really only two players; Oculus and Valve. Sony's Morpheus is a console peripheral locked to one underpowered piece of hardware so it'll always be a toy running textureless, low-poly games.

Oculus is just whining "wahhh fragmentation" because before Valve came along they were looking forward to being the only game in town and having end-to-end control of VR API's, the ecosystem and delivery platform. So Valve's more open initiatives have put pressure on them. For example Valve has been pushing OpenVR (SteamVR minus the Steam integration) while Oculus has continued to pursue more of a closed platform and walled garden with their own API. Valve also has the superior input solution with Lighthouse - technology that, again, they share and give away. Oculus got caught with their pants down on input and slopped together a subpar interim solution (Xbox controller) while they figure out how to make Oculus Touch work.

Oculus also dropped Linux and Mac platform support plans right around the time of announcing the Microsoft partnership, something they had been promising since the early kickstarter days. Valve's solution still plans on supporting Linux in addition to Windows (and I reckon Mac too but I'm not 100%).

Valve is going to be first-to-market so we'll see what happens in November. I had a lot of enthusiasm for Oculus, tried both the DK1 and DK2, but their shift away from being gaming-focused to social/mobile/everything-focused has been disheartening, so the Vive is what I'll be going with since the focus will be PC GAMING.
 
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The diversity of approaches to tackling the problems is actually a good thing at this primative point since none seem to want to work together besides impoverished AMD. :p

Yeah, fragmentation is bad and IP will get in the way too, but it's not like it's going to get done well any other way (see crappy languishing VESA standards). The author is pretty negative on outlook. In order to gain wider adoption, leading player(s) do often go for standardization. AMD offered up Mantle to Khronos, Nvidia through Apple did OpenCL and there's plenty of other examples covering decades of standardizations.

So I take the complete opposite view. Get as many methods developed and problems overcome as possible now and shake out the winners and losers later.
 
In reality it boils down to price, software and the quality of the experience. Developers can certainly choose to cross-develop experiences on the three major platforms (I'll leave which three are 'major' to your imagination) and reach the broadest audience. Initially, VR will be so fragmented, that reaching significant numbers will be challenging and I wouldn't be surprised if games get some subsidizing.

As far as experience goes, I think they really are neck and neck, although we won't know until they ship.

Of course only one of the three majors could grab major market share by releasing a couple of different games with their platform that end in '3'. Maybe in a box named after some color. All jokes aside I hope we don't see too much exclusive lock-in. Honestly, I think that although Sony has a major advantage with the fixed platform, I don't see any signs that they are really pushing into the space in a big way just yet, and they probably have the most skeptical audience - I think the average PS4 gamer is going to be quite suspicious of VR as a gimmick, given how little Sony has done with their other peripherals like Move and the various Cameras.
 
obiwansotti said:
I dunno if you wanna play hardware accelerated quake buy a 3Dfx card.

If you wanna play EVE Valkyrie, buy an Oculus.

3Dfx disappeared (bought by nvidia), maybe Oculus will too, doesn't mean jumping in at the beginning is a bad idea, or even one you'll regret.
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Oh mean I remember those 3Dfx Voodo cards, and what a monster that 128mb card was :D
I secretly wish that Nvidia would name Pascal "nVidia Voodoo". Although it does sound ridiculous in my ears.
 
ocdocdocd said:
My money's on Oculus. They've got Facebook cash which is a huge advantage. They've also got the most namebrand recognition by far, to the point that already "Oculus" is synonymous with VR. Finally, they're not against working with other companies, and as a result Samsung's GearVR is basically another Oculus product, to the extent that it's even listed on Oculus's site.
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To me Oculus having Carmack working with them is a bigger advantage than piles of FB money as having a programmer of that caliber will do a lot for solving the actual issues of VR headsets.

I still don't really understand what Facebook aims to do with Oculus. Throw money at them early and hope more comes out? Have another notch in their tech company portfolio?

Samsung is a "me too" company (and this is coming from a guy who uses one of their phones and even has their dryer), I expect absolutely nothing from their GearVR as Samsung's own software development is very lacklustre.
 
I don't see a problem with there being different vr headsets aimed at different platforms. PC gaming is head and shoulders above console gaming. Naturally I would expect a PC vr headset to be more powerful than an Xbox one. Although I can see Windows PC gaming and Xbox One console being able to share the same headset. I think if Nvidia developed their own headset it could actually turn out to be great. They do have the best cards on the market. That's just my illiterate two cents.
 
kasakka said:
I expect absolutely nothing from their GearVR as Samsung's own software development is very lacklustre.
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Last I heard Carmack was focusing on the software behind GearVR, with Samsung mostly opening things up as much as possible and fine-tuning low level drivers and such. I'd love to see them add an external sensor for positional tracking though, then we wouldn't have to worry about cables while walking around a room... I think phone VR is a worthy pursuit.
 
I lost all interest in Oculus as soon as FB bought them. I don't use FB and I'm sure not going to have a device built by them around. It's real purpose is going to be to record everything you say, do, and look at to sell to advertisers anyway. Then beam those ads directly into your eyes.
 
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