It just... Seems pointless to me. I hate 3d effects in movies, and while I only had a brief experience with the DK2, I couldn't really think of anything but "meh".

I think this is something people will try to push hard, then it will burn out rapidly (Span of months, not years) on release.

In fact, something else just occurred to me which is so simple I'm surprised it didn't pop up before - taking a drink.

I tend to keep a pint glass of water on my desk, long gaming sessions requiring fluids and all that - right now if I want a drink its a relatively simple matter of grabbing the glass.. with a headset on this suddenly becomes yet another chore :|

I've got some experience with this and the DK2 My game lets you use the leap motion input device, so you can do stuff in game by wildly waving your arms out in front of you. This has some safety issues with regards to hot beverages and monitors (particularly with throwing motions and punching things). If I need to drink my coffee, I generally just lift up my head and look down the bridge of my nose. There's a very small gap in the DK2 which lets me see where my hands are on the keyboard or in proximity to a coffee cup.

I haven't experienced the Rift or similar headsets but it does seem like it'd be pretty cool. Slaymin's screenshot got my imagination going of what it might feel like being so close to the end boss in his game. Being immersed in a game this way is something that I would love to experience however I can't quite shake the sense that there's limitations with user interactions that would become frustrating. Either the body tracking or limited real world available space to move would probably break the experience of standing next to a massive monster that's ready to rip my head off. I'm pretty sure that this stuff would be worked out by 2nd gen though and by then I'd absolutely want it to play whatever incarnation Fallout might be on.

Yay! Honorable mention! I've worked hard to make that boss monster as scary and intimidating as possible. He's really big! When you look at him in VR, he's about 20 feet tall and about as wide. I didn't want his appearance to be the only part of him which is daunting, he needs to *sound* scary as well. Each time he takes a footstep, he sounds like a massive dinosaur stomping the ground. He runs a bit like an ape, so his fists bump the ground and make a slightly more subtle fist bumping sound. He also roars a lot. When it comes to sound, it's pretty convincing that he's real. The final thing to sell his scariness is his behaviors. He will grab nearby zombies and bite their heads off and throw aside their corpses as if they were rag dolls. If he's surrounded by zombies, he smashes the ground and one-hit kills everyone nearby. As a player observing him from a distance, he looks like someone you really don't want to mess with. If he sees you, he will stop everything he is doing and charge at you. If you're walking, you can't outrun him. If you sprint, you go slightly faster than he does, but you run out of breath in 3 seconds. It is actually kind of terrifying to have a really scary looking dude charging toward you, crashing through everything because he wants to grab you and eat you, and knowing you just might not quite get away alive. Like, "whoa shit!!! RUN!!!" type of scary. Even I get a little thrilled when he chases me in debug mode.

The other aspect of VR people may miss is this idea of 'personal space' we tend to take for granted. In real life, we all have a bubble centered around us, where if something enters into it, we feel like it's invading our space. The radius of this personal space differs by culture. You can see this privacy bubble in action if you stand up really close to a stranger, or a stranger does it to you. Someone will get uncomfortable and step back a bit. This doesn't happen in traditional FPS games because you're looking at the game world through a window. But in VR, you step into the game world and game characters can come right up to you and invade that personal space. In my game, zombies will charge at you and get right up in your face and try to swing their arms at you or eat you. They invade your personal space / bubble and it feels kind of intense, particularly when you're surrounded on all sides. Through play testing, I've found that players tend to press the "back" button a lot when zombies are chasing them. In response, I've slowed down the speed of backward movement by 50% so the zombie is always right there - and you're constantly just barely out of his reach.

I don't need jump scares to thrill people in VR ;)

Yeah... if they weren't giving them out for free to Kickstarter backers, I definitely wouldn't be able to get one on launch. Australians get charged an extra $50 inexplicably, and then $132 for shipping... The total converts to ~$1105 AUD, and any imported goods over $1k have to pay 10% GST (aka VAT) to customs, so the total price is actually ~$1215 AUD.

Yeah... if they weren't giving them out for free to Kickstarter backers, I definitely wouldn't be able to get one on launch. Australians get charged an extra $50 inexplicably, and then $132 for shipping... The total converts to ~$1105 AUD, and any imported goods over $1k have to pay 10% GST (aka VAT) to customs, so the total price is actually ~$1215 AUD.

Yeah, it's an extra $100 in NZ plus $140 shipping.

Will wait for the Vive

Just had a go of the consumer rift and Oculus "Touch".

Resolution was only 1.25 times higher than DK2, but looked twice as good (two 1080x1200 panels)! Maybe better pixel shapes/layouts? Maybe better leses to distribute more pixels to the central viewing region?

Framerate was a solid 90Hz in the UE4 bullet train demo. Felt perfectly smooth.

Tracking was flawless in my demo. The Touch uses a 2nd tracking camera to solve the occlusion problem with hands, but the rift itself only ships with one tracking camera. With the rift you can now turn 180 without the camera losing track of you.

Touch was great. Better than the vive prototype controllers. Index and middle fingers have analogue triggers, which in the train demo were used for shooting and grasping objects. It felt natural to throw an object from one hand and catch it in the other. Top has three buttons and a (clickable) thumbstick. All inputs also have capacitive touch to help guess hand poses. E.g. You can point, thumbs up, or "finger guns" by taking finger/thumbs off the controller completely. Actually aiming down the sights with precise hand tracking felt really good, and actually new for the shooter genre.
Only bad news is that Touch is an optional extra to the rift (it is bundled with an Xbone controller) and won't be available until 3rd quarter.

Rift felt lighter than the DK2. Touch was also very light.
The integrated (but removable) headphones were surprisingly good. I was surrounded by 20 people, but still immersed in the trainstation's epic audio space. Comfort was way better than the DK2. strap tightening is now at the front rather than the back, there's no over-the-top strap, and there's an IPD adjustment slider that moves the lenses to suit. It seems smaller too (and smaller/lighter than the Vive).

As for "cheap VR for the masses" - they seem to see GearVR as the product to solve that problem. It's only $100 and already has a lot of games and "experiences" shipped. To begin with, Rift is for the enthusiasts.

They're working on a Steam-like storefront for curated content, accessible in the Rift and on the web. Matchmaking, friend lists, leaderboards, etc... Standard 70/30 split.

For real immerssive experience and content, Sony says playstation VR will have over 100 titles

If I wasn't getting one for free from backing the original DK1 I'd still buy it. It's a steal for the amount of hardware they pack in. From what I've read the currency conversion is generally in the ballpark between countries (compared to, say, Steam prices) but non-US people are getting slammed with ridiculous VAT or import taxes, as well as questionably expensive shipping.

Maybe they're adding insurance to the shipping or something? I wouldn't want some UPS drone breaking my $600 piece of kit because he's playing hand-ball with it and not have any recourse to replace it.

Yeah... if they weren't giving them out for free to Kickstarter backers, I definitely wouldn't be able to get one on launch. Australians get charged an extra $50 inexplicably, and then $132 for shipping... The total converts to ~$1105 AUD, and any imported goods over $1k have to pay 10% GST (aka VAT) to customs, so the total price is actually ~$1215 AUD.

Yeah, it's an extra $100 in NZ plus $140 shipping.

Will wait for the Vive

If you think the Vive is going to be cheaper you're deluding yourself. Vive can't afford to be sold at a loss, contains the same (or similar) internal hardware, ships with additional external hardware (the two "lighthouses") and will supposedly include the controllers as well.

Both the Vive and Oculus are high-end early-adopter toys, containing brand-new tech. They haven't gotten the economies of scale yet. Plus, considering Oculus is recommending a high-end PC to even run the Rift, not many people would be able to use it even if they could stomach the price. (Granted, if the price was lower, the argument could be made that the extra cash could go to upgrading your PC)

For real immerssive experience and content, Sony says playstation VR will have over 100 titles

I don't put a whole lot of faith in that. The PS4's hardware just isn't that powerful, especially compared to what Oculus is wanting for minimum specs on PC. Not to mention that add-on peripherals for consoles have historically done very poorly.

You certainly aren't going to get any AAA titles to run on it, because those struggle to run at 30 fps on 720p/1080p when you need 75 fps or higher at a potentially higher resolution.

For real immerssive experience and content, Sony says playstation VR will have over 100 titles

Sony has a history of grand ideas falling flat. PSP and the UMD format, PS EyeToy, and PS Move. Will the VR follow suit? Time will tell, but personally I think it will. I'm a huge Playstation fanboy so it saddens me to say something for my favorite system failed.

While I am not so shocked about the price (good, high-end monitors start at 500$ ... I wouldn't play a goodlooking game on a crappy TN screen no matter how low the lag and how high the refreshrate. Good, high-end TVs start at about 2000$. Why should a good, high-end VR Goggle cost any less than 600$?), I am not so convinced that VR is already going to take off in 2016... or that I actually want to expierience that, yet.

600$ certainly is not too expensive. It replaces your screen, or at least it could do that in the future. Any new screen I would get at this point would be 4k, HDR, at least IPS, better VA, even better OLED technology, more than 60Hz refresh rate if possible, and/or variable refresh rate (preferably not the vendor locked Nvidia system)... there is no point in getting any cheaper compromise Screen just to enjoy a fraction of what gaming of the future should look like that I will likely throw away again in 2 years time. I am not so fussed about 120 Hz gaming or a variable refresh rate that I would step down to a TN screen.

So I will spend upwards of 500$ likely on my next screen, as it should be a high-end, no compromise model.

What I am questioning though is if there is a killer application coming in 2016... or 2017 for that matter. It's not enough to make VR a gimmick tacked unto a traditional expierience, like many 3D movies did with the 3D expierience.

And without many other advancements, VR will be severly limited in what you can achieve. I could see myself grab for my wallet for a more immersive "piloting expierience" in flight sim games, or space games... the tech certainly is there for such things (just don't forget to include better control options than fking mouse&keyboard!)...

Anything that requires your character moving around without the frictionless "threadmill" tech that showed up on Kickstarter some years ago? Na, too much compromise... not going to bother. Seen to many early-early-adopter expieriences that gave you a glimpse of the future for extremly inflated prices and ended up disappointing in the end.

So Rift or Vive.... as long as the Software isn't there yet, and the rest of the tech needed for true VR doesn't catch up, I will only bother if I find a simulator game that I want to spend 600$ on to make it more immersive.

I don't think there will be many good games for it available... nor do I really care. I'm getting it to try to make a game for it.