Not sure if the Oculus guys are reading here, but it would be interesting to get just a little bit more information on the technical side:
- what kind of sensor is it and why does it have to be a color sensor, vs a much cheaper plain photodiode which as far as I know works equally well for this task i.e. thresholding
- what is the samplerate used, just out of curiosity
- where is the sensor placed with respect to the screen - for a normal 'scanning' LCD display the right bottom pixels of the screen are presented about a frame later, so this seriously affects measured latency
I've used the oculus rift before, and I could only use it for about 5 minutes before I would become nauseous. My experience if vertigo differed depending on which game I was playing. Also the low resolution was a lot more distracting than I thought it would be. I hope they improve some of these things before launch otherwise I would fear that this may be another video game fad.
They've already sent a high-res prototype to some developers, and they have an even higher one in development. So that problem should be fixed quickly.
There is lots of discussion about VR sickness on the developer site. It seems to be a complex problem: latency, incorrect IPD, VR distortion applied incorrectly by developers. It's going to take awhile to figure it all out.
I agree regarding the nausea, and I never get motion sick normally.
Games where you're not directly walking around are much better. I expect racing/flight sims or MechWarrior style games will be more popular than FPS initially.
The game that made me the sickest quickest was a flight simulator. I could not do more than 5 minutes without feeling like I was going to vomit. I could barely walk after I took the headset off. Other games did not effect me as badly. I have not used the Oculus for more than an hour. It is likely that people get used to it. Also my other friends who were using it, were not effected as dramatically as I.
That could be consistent with reports of the 3DS. There was a huge outcry that people were feeling ill, and the furor died down after a bit. Going back and hearing from the same people who had complained, they either had adjusted the effect to acceptable levels, turned it off completely, or got used to the effect.
It takes a while to get comfortable with standing on a boat, as well.
Is this problem understood formally? For example, I couldn't play Portal 2 without feeling dizzy and any game that involves water or swimming does it as well. I can't imagine 3D glasses helping, yet I'd love to use technology like this. Why does Portal 2 do this but not BF3 or PlanetSide 2?
I was surprised when I tried the included demo (tuscan village or something). The latency was really bad. I thought they had a big focus on bringing down the latency though.
Could I have had a defective unit? Or does it matter what PC it's running on, etc? Is it normally really good?
The PC could certainly be a cause. Some video card drivers, for example, deal poorly with multiple displays or secondary displays, and add an extra frame or two of buffering.
Having a device like this certainly improves testing the PC side.
I found substantial difference between machines (and OS's). It was quite slow in a Lenovo x220 running Linux, and much better on a mac mini (running MacOS).
- what kind of sensor is it and why does it have to be a color sensor, vs a much cheaper plain photodiode which as far as I know works equally well for this task i.e. thresholding
- what is the samplerate used, just out of curiosity
- where is the sensor placed with respect to the screen - for a normal 'scanning' LCD display the right bottom pixels of the screen are presented about a frame later, so this seriously affects measured latency