Well 6 months later and my pre-order has finally arrived...
Here's what I think (My system: i7 4970K @ 4Ghz GTX980 16GB DDR, SSD).
- Setup was easy - took me about 10 minutes
- First experience of immersion was amazing
But it went down hill from there...
What was in the box
I was expecting spare padding, alternative lenses and a cloth lens wipe, nope none of these.
Plastic battery divider which you pull from the oculus rift remote was wedged and I had to slide the back off. Smart packaging and box.
The screen and the screen door effect
Well the resolution stats sound ok, but they are not. I've watched so many reviews and everyone says it's barely noticeable, I don't know what planet they are on or how poor their eye sight is but it's noticable, very noticable. Unless you have constant movement either by your head or the image being rendered to the screens it will be in your face, literally. A nice lattice grid over everything. I'm sure they are using a Galaxy S5 screen (still DK2?) or other low res samsung screen (Samsung screens tend to have more of a diamond lattice I've noticed).
Screen resolution
So, not happy with what I was seeing, I decided to run some tests myself. I cooked up a quick application with some 4K textures of lava and earth with normal maps etc, slapped them onto some spheres and confirmed very poor resolution, combined with interlace / alias effects which are present everywhere. There is no way you can get a decent / sharp image / texture at the resolution of these screens. If there was no screen door it would be acceptable.
Lens Smudge / Blur Glow / God Rays
I started noticing glows on text or bright objects on dark (not even completely black) backgrounds. So I jumped over to unity, cooked up a skybox of some space textures I had and stuck some 3D text in the view (white). Wow... I've not seen effects like that since the credits from Superman.
Field of view
It's like looking through a diving mask with more of your view blocked off. It really feels like I am looking through an diving mask / snorkeling mask, I forget about the screen door effect more than this.
Tracking
Works fine, I have noticed a lot content doesn't pick up on leaning left or right. And doesn't take into account when your looking behind you that left and right are reversed. I have also noticed all HUD are rotated slightly on my rift (probably need to re-calibrate that some how). I have a few stutters / jumps when looking directly back (HTC Vive wont have this issue). I didn't expect the sensor to be so big. It's taller than my yetti mic, good solid build however.
Headset
Good build, light, really needs to be able to adjust eye width more without screwing up the vision portal your looking through. I am at max width. I have also found that if I pull the rift off my face some hwere around 1 to 3 cm things can look much better, it removes some of the smudge effect also (thinking about sticking something to the padding to do this). There is also light let in from the nose area (issue on both vive and rift), I also had to turn light of which is directly above me in the room as I could detect it in headset. Headphones were ok, but it only took me 10 minutes before I removed them and used my own.
Controller
I'm no xbox fan or user but I'm sure the new xbox controller had modular components etc? This is just the same as my old £5 xbox pc controller just wireless.
360 Video
Resolution is so low that I think VHS would be 4K compared to this. No, just no.
360 Photographs
The supplied free images were cool but very low file size and quality. So found 60 panoramic high resolution images some as big as 20mega pixel. I didn't notice any quality improvement at all. You always get a feeling like your about 30ft off the floor, it scared the s**t out of my mother. So yes and no, light pictures with no bright and dark contrast worked well eg above the cloud line, egypt, rome, beaches etc.
Virtual Desktop (steam app)
Screen resolution makes things quite hard to read, usable but not practical at the moment. The application however has some nice features and some things that just don't work at all. Screen size (yes), screen distance (no - seen this just moving the screen a very small amount in a diagonal direction - guess the dev cant work out the normal from the camera normal and then add and offset the two). Tested youtube world of warcraft 360 video and the starwars one, both worked, let down by the resolution, no screen door or glows noticed. 360 image viewer views images differently to the Oculus home software also couldn't handle certain image (I think due to size) and threw an unknown parameter error but worked for the most part. I added 60, I could select all but couldn't delete all after grrr.
Elite Dangerous
God rays, poor text readability but still quite immersive. Can struggle and stutter if you don't lower your quality settings enough.
Project Cars
Complete rubbish, I played with the settings in game and in the SDK tool and never got anything I felt comfortable with. Environment flickering, render distances were poor and have to reset rift position each time the game starts. But I've come to expect this from the creators of this game. So if you have a 980, i7 @4970k @4Ghz with 16GB DDR3, crank everything down to low, aliasing, bloom etc off and make sure you map easy to access controls / keys so you can change camera view and reset the head set position when needed. Shame there is no image quality or resolution quality on any VR at the moment as views in the distance are just a smeering of pixels and screen door. And the HUD, WTF they thinking. I'm sure some developer spent about 5 minutes whom couldn't give 1 f*** about the task... However there is another, "Assetto Corsa".
Assetto Corsa
Spent some time configuring this (much less than with project cars) but I found I could leave so much more on. The game has the same if not better graphics than project cars. So I broke out the ThrustMaster T500 wheel and pedals, got setup and nice, Very nice. Better sitting location, can lean and look around car. Can actually read the dials (unlike project cars). Dust and god rays on the windows. And crashing has me cringing in my seat. By far the best VR experience I've had yet, 2nd was the setup demo of the Dino and the Alien. You can't get passed the limitations of the resolution (detail pixel blur - which is in all tings) but I totally forgot about the screen door effect in Assetto Corsa. And having your arms and hands in the same position in the game as they are on the steering wheel is awesome. I crashed once and felt like I was still moving forward! Got me a bit weezy that did.
Motion Sickness
I've had a bad stomach for the past 2 days since the rift has arrived, is VR the cause? or was it the potato salad I ate? I've spent close to 6 hours each day in it so far and that's not counting development time.
If I were to rate what I have talked about
10/10 Build quality and comfort
10/10 Weight
8/10 Tracking
8/10 Lens gap adjustment
0/10 No adjustment for lens to eye distance adjustment
10/10 Having headphones and allowing them to be detached
0/10 Not blocking external light from nose and upper padding areas
0/10 Screen resolution and thus screen door effect
0/10 Lens smear/blur/glow
2/10 Diving Mask field of view
48 out of 100 (4.8/10)
Issues in order of severity:
1. Screen resolution / ppi
2. Field of view
3. Lens blur/smear/glow
Recommendation
I will wait for Oculus Rift CV3, HTC Vive v3 and the GTX 1280ti/1380ti, maybe by then 2 way SLI would make it possible to have 1 graphics card to handle the graphics output for each eye which would help with not having hardware that can power the resolutions needed.
Development tests I have carried out
Best I can capture with my rubbish web cam but at least there are some previews.
A quick demo I programmed up to demonstrate lens glare/smear/blur/glow effect.
Another quick demo I programmed up to demonstrate 4K texture translation and minor aliasing issues but these aliasing issues are present in most things in VR at these screen resolutions.
Another quick demo I programmed up to test some better textures I found, 8K and 4K textures, set to 4096x 16bit, created some normal textures for them, slapped on some spheres and rotated. About as good as it gets. Lots of lens glow from white text exampled.
This is about as close as I can illustrate what you see when you put on the rift: an example of the view port, what you actually see and are expected to forget about. Black sides, room light from nose area, screen door and a little glow from white objects in the 3D scene bottom center.
Conclusion
At the moment, VR in my opinion is a FAIL. The resolution is a joke / insult, the lens blur/smear/glow for someone like me whom loves space games is a huge disappointment and the screen door effect just about tolerable. Not to mention your full field of view is not covered and puts you in a diving mask (good for a 1st person diving game I guess lol).
Neither the Rift or the Vive should have been released with screens of this resolution / ppi. Should have been at least 1440p / 2k per an eye. The field of view needs to be at least 180 to 200 deg, and they should have worked out the lens blur/smudge/smear all before release.
