Are we witnessing a revolution in VR?

[Chihuahua]

@Pantastic

OK, that makes sense. Being able to look around at your cockpit and its controls hadn’t really occurred to me, I was thinking more in terms of what you’d see outside. And when I think about it, of course a VR of something like WOW could be immersive even sticking to cartoon-style graphics.

Of course, this could also work the other way around. What would happen if I were in an armored vehicle, and a VR headset eliminated the need for glass windows? Or if a pilot could look down and see the ground beneath the aircraft? There’s a lot of applications for VR/AR outside of gaming that we’re only just beginning to explore.

[Ryan_Liam]

@Pantastic

So how does ‘walking around’ get handled in the current generation of VR - do you use controls to move around and just turn your head to skew the view, or do you need a really large open space or treadmill so that you can actually move?

On a personal level, I’m not really bothered about that aspect, although I acknowledge that’s a hurdle for developers. I think it would be a good tool for racing games especially.

[Dr.Strangelove]

@Pantastic

So how does ‘walking around’ get handled in the current generation of VR - do you use controls to move around and just turn your head to skew the view, or do you need a really large open space or treadmill so that you can actually move?

I wrote a bit about my experience with the HTC Vive here.

The quick version is that you get a room-sized space to move around in, but the world looks larger than that. If you get near the physical walls, then virtual walls pop up to show that you can’t go any farther. If you want to move to another area of the world, you point your controller to that area and teleport the entire room–it fades to black, and then fades in at the new area.

For motion sickness reasons, it’s important to never have motion in the virtual world that is different from your motion in the physical world. That’s why they teleport instead of sliding your room area to someplace new (or using a joystick to navigate your character around).

[Ryan_Liam]

That HTC Vive looks bulky, for me a console is only as good as the games for it, s#is for example, GTA V on HTC Vive or will be?

[Epimetheus]

Personally, I feel this is just a small step towards everyday AR (Augmented Reality). Games are a good use case for VR, but it’s just too restrictive for everyday tasks on the computer. I suppose using VR would be good for surgery or similar medical procedures, but I think AR would be just fine for these tasks.

I don’t know that it’ll ever be possible to do stuff with contacts like many Science Fiction stories portray, but I suspect at some point they’ll be light enough and stylish enough that a good majority of people will want to use some form of AR.

[GargoyleWB]

@Pantastic

So how does ‘walking around’ get handled in the current generation of VR - do you use controls to move around and just turn your head to skew the view, or do you need a really large open space or treadmill so that you can actually move?

I recently used a Samsung VR doing an architectural/marketing environment, a big hotel lobby type of simulation. I sat myself in a spinny office chair, and used the hardware mouse function for lateral movement. It was easy to explore the whole space without ever taking a physical step (though twirling and grinning in the office chair like an idiot).